The inland NSW town of Tenterfield, in particular its footballers, can take some credit for one musical career.

Picture this: it's a midwinter Saturday night three years ago and in one of the pubs a covers band are playing. Their lead singer is a slim, dark-haired girl with a voice to notice, but no name worth anything. The local team have won and are on the turps.

"We were playing old western swing and old American country, and this bunch of drongo football players were yelling out, 'Play country'," says Corrina Steel, the singer in question. "I thought that's what we were doing, but they got quite angry about it.

One of them yelled out, 'Play some Shania.'

"So I put my guitar down, left the band with it, went upstairs [and] swore I'd never play in another covers band again. And I never have."

The blow-up may have surprised the band members left behind on the stage, but it had been coming. Steel had been writing her own songs for a couple of years because, "I realised that nobody else was going to write them for me."

"I've never let anything I don't know how to do stop me from doing it."

Get the feeling there's a stubborn streak in Corrina Steel? Maybe so. Enough of one to make her spend the next three years writing, performing, financing and recording an album of original material.

That album, Wayward, is a record that might be called country, although it has nothing in common with anything Tamworth celebrates. It might also be called bluesy or dark folk, too. The safest bet is to call it roots music: the kind of melange of all three styles you find throughout the singer-songwriter underground of the US.

Wayward recently secured a distribution deal, but the fact anyone is hearing it at all is a bonus for Steel.

"When I was making it, I wasn't really thinking about what people might like; I'm pretty self-indulgent. I thought the album could very easily fall by the wayside because it doesn't fit in anywhere here."

So she made it thinking it wouldn't sell? For herself?

"Yeah," she says with a laugh.

"To play to the grandkids: 'Here, kids - this is what sent me broke.'"

"I had to do it this way because nobody would have given me any freedom if I'd gone through a record company. I didn't want my album sounding like all those other Australian country albums. I didn't really have any choice. I wanted to do it by myself."

Steel knows to sustain a career she'll have to go to the US, where she has already travelled and performed on a small scale.

"It was great. It changed my view towards music. Maybe I would have done one of those Australian albums if I hadn't gone there."

Given the world doesn't need yet another dull Australian country album, thank God, and some drunk footballers, she didn't.